Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Belgium; Laboratory of Biological Psychology, University of Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Leuven, Belgium.
Neuroimage. 2010 Feb 15;49(4):3414-25. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.11.022. Epub 2009 Nov 14.
Previous studies have revealed regions in human visual cortex with a strong preference for faces, headless bodies, and buildings. We investigated whether the pattern of activity in these category-selective regions is related to more subordinate distinctions among objects. Our experiments included two types of faces (elderly faces and baby faces), body parts (hands and torsos), and buildings (rural buildings and skyscrapers). Multi-voxel pattern analyses revealed very clear differences in the activation pattern between hands and torsos, and smaller but significant differences in the activation pattern between the two face conditions and between the two building conditions. The subordinate specificity was very distributed, as all category-selective regions were most selective for the distinction between hands and torsos, independently from their preferred category. The selectivity for hands versus torsos was preserved across exemplars and image orientations in all category-selective regions, indicating that the distributed subordinate selectivity is related to relatively invariant and higher-order properties of the images.
先前的研究揭示了人类视觉皮层中存在一些对人脸、无头身体和建筑物有强烈偏好的区域。我们研究了这些类别选择性区域中的活动模式是否与物体之间更次要的区别有关。我们的实验包括两种类型的脸（老年人的脸和婴儿的脸）、身体部位（手和躯干）和建筑物（乡村建筑和摩天大楼）。多体素模式分析显示，手和躯干之间的激活模式差异非常明显，而在两种脸条件和两种建筑物条件之间的激活模式差异较小，但具有显著意义。次优特异性分布非常广泛，因为所有类别选择性区域对手和躯干之间的区别最具选择性，而与它们的首选类别无关。在手和躯干之间的选择性在所有类别选择性区域中都跨越了样本和图像方向得以保留，这表明分布的次优选择性与图像的相对不变和更高阶的属性有关。
